Over the past several years, businesses have begun to realize the reduced costs and fees associated with electronic disbursements. When processing refunds, rebates, rewards, or otherwise refunding money to customers, businesses have come to appreciate the simplicity and cost effectiveness of electronic processing. Paper checks can be expensive both to issue and ultimately to reconcile. Furthermore, various e-commerce or e-business solutions have become available that allow individuals and businesses to perform financial transactions over the Internet through a secure website. This type of service enables customers to do their banking or financial transaction processing from anywhere where Internet access is available. In many cases, a web browser is utilized and any normal Internet connection is suitable. Thus, online financial transactions have become commonplace.
However, problems exist with current systems. When receiving refunds or other disbursements customers are often required to contact the business making the disbursements, by phone in order to receive the disbursement. Furthermore, customers typically do not have a choice in how the disbursement is received. The business will often make the disbursement by issuing a paper check.
From the perspective of businesses, the limited availability of customer information prevents businesses from ascertaining how customers would like to receive disbursements or how customers are able to receive disbursements. Businesses may not have access to bank account or credit card information that would be required to automatically disburse funds electronically. Accordingly, the lack of centralization and information remains a problem for both businesses and customers. Customers often cannot receive disbursements through their preferred method and businesses are often unable to determine a preferred disbursement method for each customer.
Third party aggregators have evolved to consolidate payment services. However, even if customers and businesses are able to transfer funds through a third party aggregator, these funds are not linked to financial information, which is typically only available through a financial institution. Thus, bill payment and disbursements are not visually linked to accounts or to any type of accounting system. Therefore, in order to get a larger financial picture, both businesses and customers must access disparate systems and review the information available from all of these systems.
For business owners, the payables and receivables environment is typically fragmented and includes multiple tools and programs that focus on only individual components of cash flow. These disjointed payables and receivable processes can have a negative impact on cash flow due to the incomplete overview available to business owners. Typically, business owners are required to rekey data in order to manually reconcile disbursements. Furthermore, business owners may be required to rekey data and manually manage disbursements and reimbursements to employees. Additionally, businesses may not have one consolidated view of their cash flow and may be required to visit multiple sources in order to assess cash flow status.
Accordingly, a solution is needed that provides financial institution clients, particularly organizational entities such as large corporations, government entities, small businesses, non-profit entities etc. (hereinafter referenced as “business clients”) with a solution that integrates disbursements into accounting and financial management software. The solution may be operable to show a complete cash flow picture by creating an experience that manages movement of money from start to finish and offers business owners real time transparency. To further enhance convenience, customers and businesses both want to handle cash flow while in transit. Therefore, a need exists and a solution is needed for convenient mobile interfaces for generating and accepting disbursements.